“Will be going to Pennsylvania today in order to give my total support to RICK SACCONE, running for Congress in a Special Election (March 13). Rick is a great guy. We need more Republicans to continue our already successful agenda!”

Of course, Trump immediately had to walk back this comment because his trip to the keystone state was being paid for with public tax dollars. He had to say that it was an official White House event and not (as he indicated in the tweet) that it was a campaign event.

You know, for once I agree with Trump.

Rick Saccone IS Trump’s kind of guy.

He has lots of experience as a Yes Man. That’s really all he’s done in Harrisburg.

We used to have our own version of Trump – a Republican Governor who had no idea how to do his job – Tom Corbett.

Of course, Corbett’s reign was short lived. Like the President, his popularity plummeted and he was voted out of office like yesterday’s garbage.

But he had his loyal bobble head Saccone backing him every step of the way.

In fact, he voted for Corbett’s initiatives 95% of the time giving him the nickname of Corbett’s “Mini-me.”

Even when Corbett proposed something deeply unpopular, like cutting almost $1 billion from the state’s poorest public schools, Saccone went out there to explain why our children, our future, just weren’t worth the investment.

The Swamp recognizes Saccone as one of their own.

That’s why big moneyed interests are pouring cash on the sycophantic lawmaker. That and the fact that the district in question went for Trump in the last election by 20 points.

Congressional Leadership Fund has put aside at least $1.6 million for ads, not to mention funding from outsiders like the 45Committee and Ending Spending – a group founded by the mega-donor Ricketts family.

All this money just to serve out the remainder of Murphy’s term!

Whoever wins would be up for re-election in November to secure a full two-year term.

Moreover, now that the state Supreme Court has overturned the Commonwealth’s gerrymandered districts that unfairly favor Republicans, that November race is likely to include newly drawn legislative lines.

So this GOP wonderland that boosted Trump and Mitt Romney in 2012 will likely become more competitive.

Some polls have Saccone up over Lamb by only a 3 point lead. This may be in part because of Trump’s steadily deflating support – even among Republicans. The President’s approval rating in the district has dropped to 49 percent – not far from the national picture where 47 percent disapprove of his job performance.

This is not good news for Saccone.

The SuperPACS supporting him are trying to paint Lamb, a former federal prosecutor, as a Nancy Pelosi puppet.

But Lamb has repeatedly criticized Pelosi, telling The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that he would not support Pelosi as the Democratic leader. There is a “need [for] new leadership on both sides,” Lamb said.

Perhaps he doesn’t understand that a politician’s job is to serve the needs of his or her constituents.

Judging by his less than stellar performance in state government, this would seem to be the case.

He’s come a long way from earnestly trying to legislate past the establishment clause of the first amendment to fighting to starve our schools to running for a position as Trump’s favorite puppet.

Or not.

That depends on voters this March.

Full Disclosure:I am not a Saccone fan. Along with teachers, parents and students from across western Pennsylvania, I’ve picketed outside of his offices demanding he do his job and provide for students. He was deaf to our cries. Do you hear me now, Rick?

The database defines a mass shooting as one in which at least four people (not counting the shooter) were shot regardless of whether those wounds were fatal or not. And since some shootings go unreported, it’s likely only giving us the bare minimum.

But that’s just mass death and destruction.

The overwhelming majority of gun deaths are smaller scale – police brutality, domestic violence, suicides, accidents, etc. America’s total annual firearm deaths came to more than 33,000 in 2014.

You need no further proof of that than the weekly report of which school got struck by the lightning of gun violence. Which children were mowed down by the consequences of an out of control plutocracy today?

–THE RIGHT OF ENROLLMENT, so school operators get to choose whether your child gets to attend, unlike public schools which have to accept your child no matter what – so long as you live in the district.

You get elected school boards, open documents, open meetings, the right to self-government, the right of enrollment, quality services, quality teachers, diverse classmates, common sense discipline policies, an unbiased secular education, free time and money! That’s right! You actually get all that and more money in your pocket!

To do so, they linked the performance of foreign students on international tests of reading, mathematics, and science to the proficiency benchmarks of NAEP and thus Common Core aligned tests which use NAEP benchmarks to determine passing or failure.

The difference is the NAEP is only meant to compare how students in various states stack up against each other. Common Core tests, on the other hand, apply exclusively to kids within states.

No one’s actually expected to pass the NAEP. It’s only given to a sample of kids in each state and used to rank state education systems. The U.S. government, however, gives almost all its students Common Core tests and expects them all to pass – in fact, failure to do so could result in your public school being closed and replaced with a charter or voucher institution.

However, in both cases, the study concluded the score needed to meet the bare minimum of passing was absurdly too high – so much so that hardly any group of children in the entire world met it.

It’s important to note that these aren’t standardized testing skeptics.

They believe in the assessments. They even believe in Common Core. What they don’t believe in is the benchmarks we’re expecting our kids to meet to consider them having passed.

And this has massive consequences for the entire education system.

The media has uncritically repeated the lie that American public schools are failing based almost exclusively on test scores that show only one third of our students passing.

But if the same tests were given to students the world over with the same standard for success, even less would pass it, according to the study. If we drew the red line on international tests at the same place we draw it on the NAEP and Common Core tests, almost every child in the world would be a dunce.

Kids from Singapore would fail. Kids from South Korea would fail. Kids from Japan would fail. You name a country where kids do nothing but study for high stakes standardized tests, and even they couldn’t meet our uniquely American criterion for passing.

In fact, the percentage of our students who do pass under these ridiculous benchmarks often exceeds that of other countries.

So when you hold kids up to impossible standards a few actually make it – and more of our kids do than our international peers.

That doesn’t mean the benchmarks are good. But it doesn’t mean the American education system is failing either. In fact, just the opposite.

We have a high stakes standardized testing system that not only does not assess kids fairly, but it actually hides their success!

If you’re proficient, it’s thought you’re competent, you are able to do something. You might not be incredible at it, but you can get the job done.

Kind of like this:

Hey. Did you hear about my leaky faucet? The plumber fixed it after three tries because he’s proficient at his job.

Oh really? My plumber fixed my leaky faucet in only one try and didn’t even charge me because she’s advanced at her job.

That sort of thing.

There are only four scores you can achieve on most standardized assessments: Advanced, Proficient, Basic and Below Basic. The first two are considered passing and the last two are failing.

However, this doesn’t line up with the five general grades most public schools give in core subjects:

A – Excellent

B – Very good

C – Average

D – Poor

F – Failing

A-D is usually considered passing. Only F is failing.

So you might expect them to line up like this:

Advanced – A and B

Proficient – C

Basic – D

Below Basic – F

However, that’s not how they line up on NAEP. According to Diane Ravitch, who served on the National Assessment Governing Board, the federal agency that supervises NAEP, they line up like this:

Advanced – A+

Proficient – A

Basic – B and C

Below Basic – D and F

This is important, because saying someone scored a proficient on the NAEP doesn’t mean they’re just okay at it. It means they’re excellent but have room to improve.

The problem is that when developers of Common Core tests set their benchmarks, they used almost the same ones as the NAEP. Yet the NAEP benchmarks were never meant to be the same as grade level ones. Confounding the two puts mere passing out of reach for most students.

And that’s not just out of reach for most American students. It’s out of reach for international students!

In short, American students are doing B work on their Common Core tests and failing with a Basic. Yet in other countries, this would be passing with room to spare.

“National judgments about student proficiency and many state Common Core judgments about “career and college readiness” are defective and misleading… According to NAEP officials, Proficient does not mean grade level performance. The misuse of the term confuses the public. The effects of this misuse are reflected in most Common Core assessments…

NAEP’s term “Proficient” does not even mean proficient. “Students who may be proficient in a subject, given the common usage of the term, might not satisfy the requirements for performance at the NAEP achievement level.”

The report even cites other independent analysts that have come to similar conclusions such as the U.S. General Accounting Office, the National Academy of Sciences, and the Brookings Institution.

“Advocates who push for school improvement on the grounds of questionable benchmarks are not strengthening education and advancing American interests, but undermining public schools and weakening the United States.”

Some specifics.

The study was conducted by comparing performance of foreign students on international tests of reading, mathematics, and science with the NAEP and American Common Core tests.

Very few foreign students were able to score high enough to meet what is considered proficiency on the NAEP and Common Core tests.

In fact, in 4th grade reading, not a single nation was able to meet the benchmark.

In 8th grade math, only three nations (Singapore, South Korea and Japan) had 50 percent or more students who could meet the criterion.

In 8th grade science, only one nation (Singapore) had 50 percent or more students meeting the benchmark.

But wait.

Even though the benchmarks are unfair and few nations children could meet them, the percentage of U.S. children who did meet them was higher than most other nations.

Take 4th grade reading.

No one had 50% or more of its kids scoring a proficient or advanced. But 31% of U.S. kids actually met the benchmark, putting us fifth behind only Singapore, the Russian Federation, Finland, and England.

Only 31% of our kids could do it, but only four other nations out of 40 could do better.

Bottom line, Common Core benchmarks are too high and paint an unfair picture of our education system, according to the study:

“When citizens read that “only one-third” or “less than half” of the students in their local schools are proficient in mathematics, science, or reading, they can rest assured that the same judgments can be applied to students throughout most of the world…

Globally, in just about every nation where it is possible to compare student performance with our national benchmarks, the vast majority of students cannot demonstrate their competence because the bars are set unreasonably high.”

At very least, this invalidates the scores of the NAEP and every Common Core test yet given in this country. It demands we set new benchmarks that are in line with grade level performance.

And since home-schooling operates with almost zero oversight, it is the most susceptible to child neglect and mistreatment.

Children who in traditional public schools would have a whole plethora of people from teachers to counselors to principals to cafeteria workers who can observe the danger signs of abuse are completely removed from the home-school environment.

Home-schooled children receive their educations almost exclusively from parents.

Charter and voucher schools at least utilize whole staffs of people to educate children. The chances of something like this happening at these institutions is much smaller. However, both types of school also are much less accountable for their actions than traditional public schools.

And that is the common factor – responsibility. Who is being held answerable when things go wrong? At traditional public schools, there is a whole chain of adults who are culpable for children. At these other institutions, the number of people in the hot seat shrinks to zero.

Much of that has to do with the regulations each state puts on privatized schools.

In 14 states including Delaware, California and Wisconsin, parents don’t have to do anything but let the school district know they’re home-schooling. That’s it! And in 10 states including Texas, Illinois and New Jersey, you don’t even have to do that!

Kids just disappear without a trace. If no one reports them missing, we assume they’re being home-schooled.

But even in states that appear to be more exacting on paper, the reality is a virtual free-for-all.

Take my home state of Pennsylvania. To begin home-schooling, parents must notify the superintendent, have obtained a high school degree themselves, provide at least 180 days of instruction in certain subjects and maintain a portfolio of their child’s test results and academic records.

That sounds impressive. However, this doesn’t really amount to much in practice because these regulations have few teeth. Hardly anyone ever checks up to make sure these regulations are being met – and they’re only allowed to check up under certain circumstances and only in certain ways and at certain times!

Moreover, all privatized schools can withhold providing a proper education. Home-school parents can refuse to teach their children not just truths about science and history but the basics of reading, writing and math. Likewise, charter and voucher schools can cut student services and pocket the savings as profit. And no one is the wiser because the state has abrogated its responsibility to check up on students or even require they be taught much of anything at all.

Some, including myself, would argue that the regulations required of public schools by the state and federal government are sometimes too onerous, unnecessary or even just plain dumb. But that doesn’t change the fact that regulations are necessary. It just leaves open the question of which ones.

Looked at in the abstract, no one in their right mind would conceivably suggest the latter is a better educational environment than the former. However, we have been subjected to an expensive propaganda campaign to make us think otherwise.

Look. I’m not saying public schools are perfect. Certainly students can be abused there, too. The media salaciously reports every doe-eyed teacher who stupidly has a sexual relationship with a student – whether it be at a public or privatized school. But in comparison with the worst that can and often does happen at privatized schools, these incidents at public schools are extremely rare (1 in 800,000) and of much less severity.

Though both are bad, there is a world of difference between the infinitesimal chance of being propositioned by your high school teacher and the much more likely outcome of being treated like a prison inmate at 13 by the charter school corporation or being starved, shackled and beaten by your parents!

Human beings aren’t going to stop being human anytime soon. Wouldn’t it be better to entrust our children to an environment with regulations and accountability than letting them go off in some locked room and just trusting that everything will be alright?

Our posterity deserves better than privatization.

They deserve the best we can give them – and that means fully responsible, fully regulated, fully accountable public schools.

No one physically abused me in any way that did lasting physical harm.

But I was misused.

I was harassed.

And I shouldn’t have been.

I was made a victim, and my victimizer was a woman.

That, alone, shames me to my core.

I’m a grown man.

We’re not supposed to care about things like this.

We’re supposed to be unfeeling, undisturbed, stoic cowboys with our eyes ever fixed on the horizon.

If anything, I should be the one accused, not the accuser.

Some would deny that you even CAN sexually harass a man.

They’d look at the cultural ideal of manhood as an emotionally stunted beast of burden, and say men are too callous and shallow to be susceptible to this sort of pain. After all, men are always ready for the next sexual encounter. Or we should be, because that’s what it means to be a man.

But they’re wrong.

Men have feelings, too. We hurt. We cry. And we can be scarred by unwelcome advances.

So what happened?

It was almost thirty years ago.

I was just a kid in middle or high school – 8th or 9th grade.

It was in pottery class.

I’ve always loved the arts. I used to draw every spare second. My notebooks were covered with doodles and sketches. Cartoon dinosaurs and skulls. Sometimes an alien or dragon.

And I loved working with clay, too.

For years my mother had a vase I made in that pottery class. It was fat on the bottom with a slender neck. Purple glaze on the outside with a blue interior. Mom displayed it proudly in her dinning room, sometimes with a few flowers inside, until one day it accidentally fell from a shelf and shattered.

I might have been working on that same vase when it happened. I really can’t remember.

I think it was a pinch pot.

I was standing at a table I shared with three or four other students, wrapping tubes of hand rolled clay around and around into the shape of a container, when someone came up behind me, grabbed my butt and squeezed.

I jumped in surprise, and said “Ohh!” or something.

Then I heard, “Hey, sweet cheeks!”

And laughter. All coming from the other side of the room.

I turned my head to see who it had been.

It was a girl I hardly knew though she had been in my classes since first grade.

Let’s call her Nancy.

She was a chunky but not unattractive girl from the other side of the room.

She walked back to her friends, both boys and girls, at her table, and they were all losing it over what had happened.

I blushed and turned back to my work, feeling like the clay my fingers molded.

I couldn’t even process what had happened.

Why had Nancy just walked over to me and pinched my butt?

It wasn’t even a playful pinch. It wasn’t grabbing someone with the palm of your hand and giving a squeeze. She had clawed into my flesh, secured a good hunk and pulled.

It was angry and mean.

I didn’t understand. What had I ever done to her?

I barely knew her. I hadn’t said more than ten words to her in eight years.

“You like that?” she asked from across the room.

I just kept working on my pot, looking at it as if it were the only thing left in the universe.

The others at my table were giggling, too.

I remember it like a scene in slow motion. Me rolling out and unwinding the clay. Everyone else laughing. Nancy smirking.

And then she came back and did it again!

I jumped and squealed.

But I did nothing. I said nothing.

She pinched me at least three or four more times. Maybe more.

And she said something each time.

And like it was on a script, always the laughter and guffaws.

Eventually I think I started to quietly cry.

That’s when it stopped mostly.

The others at my table were as silent as I was. When they saw my reaction, I think they got embarrassed.

We were all working with incredible concentration trying not to acknowledge what was happening.

I made sure not to turn and look behind me. But I could hear the snickers.

Where was the teacher?

The room had a strange L-shape. At the foot of the L was a kiln where she was diligently firing last week’s pottery. From where she was, she probably couldn’t see the rest of us working at our tables.

I don’t think she saw anything. She never said anything if she did.

When she returned to our side of the art room, she may have asked if I was okay. I’m not sure. I probably just shrugged it off. Maybe asked to go to the bathroom.

Why did this bother me so much?

Because I wasn’t asking for anyone to come over and touch me like that.

I just wanted to make my stupid pot. I just wanted to be left alone.

I didn’t want to be treated like anyone’s joke. I didn’t want my physicality to be the cause of anyone’s laughter.

It’s not that Nancy was a pariah or a terrible person or anything. If things had been different, I might have responded differently.

But when you’re a guy in high school, you aren’t allowed to be upset when a girl comes and pinches you.

You’re supposed to respond a certain way.

I couldn’t ask her to stop. I’m supposed to love it.

Even if it’s a joke.

Even if it’s a way to denigrate me in front of the whole class. Even if it’s a way to proclaim me the most undesirable boy in the whole room.

It felt like someone pointing at a banana peel in the trash and mockingly saying, “Yum! Yum!”

But I was the garbage.

It certainly made me feel that way.

I’m not sure why this has bothered me for so long.

Maybe it’s the feeling of powerlessness – that there was nothing I could do. Maybe it was a feeling that I should be reacting differently. I should be more assertive either telling her to leave me alone or maybe actually liking the physical contact.

I’m not sure how to explain it.

I was made to feel inferior and degraded.

Perhaps that’s why I’ve remained silent about it all these years. The only solution had seemed to be to forget about it and move on.

Yet doing so leaves a cold lump in your chest. Oh, it won’t kill you. But it’s always there. You just learn to live with it.

I suppose in writing about it, I’m trying to rid myself of that lump.

I don’t know if it will work. But I’m tired of carrying it around with me anymore.

We’re living in a remarkable moment. Women everywhere feel empowered to share their stories of abuse at the hands of men. Shouldn’t I feel empowered to share my story of abuse at the hands of a woman?

But there does seem to be a disconnect here. A disanalogy.

No matter who you are, everyone has been the victim at one point or another.

Whether you’re male or female, rich or poor, black or white – everyone has been on the losing side.

However, some people use that truth as an excuse to pretend that all groups have been equally targeted. They use it as a way to justify the marginalization and minimalization of women and people of color, for instance, groups that have been most often earmarked for abuse.

“We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character–that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. The broad education will, therefore, transmit to one not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living.”

So for King it wasn’t enough for schools to teach facts. It wasn’t enough to teach skills, math, writing, reading, history and science. The schools are also responsible for teaching children character – how to be good people, how to get along with each other.

When King wrote, there were basically two kinds of school – public and private. Today there is a whole spectrum of public and private each with its own degree of self-governance, fiscal accountability and academic freedom.

Private schools are by their very nature exclusionary. They attract and accept only certain students. These may be those with the highest academics, parental legacies, religious beliefs, or – most often – families that can afford the high tuition. As such, their student bodies are mostly white and affluent.

That is not King’s ideal. That is not the best environment to form character, the best environment in which to learn about people who are different than you and to develop mutual understanding.

Homeschooling is hard to generalize. There is such a wide variety of experiences that can be described under this moniker. However, they often include this feature – children are taught at home by their parent or parents. They may or may not interact with their academic peers and the degree to which they meet and understand different cultures is variable to say the least. They may meet King’s ideal, but frankly the majority of them probably do not.

So we’re left with traditional public schools. Do they instill “intelligence plus character”?

Answer: it depends.

There are many public schools where children of different races, nationalities, religions, and creeds meet, interact and learn together side-by-side.

Students wearing hajibs learn next to those wearing yarmulkes. Students with black skin and white skin partner with each other to complete class projects. Students with parents who emigrated to this country as refugees become friends with those whose parents can trace their ancestors back to the Revolutionary War.

Which brings me to the second section of King’s early essay that pops off the page:

“The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.”

Seventy one years ago, King was warning us about the situation we suffer today.

When we allow academics to be distinct from character and understanding, we put ourselves at the mercy of leaders with “reason, but with no morals.”